Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Please join us for this semester's faculty research seminar, which is being held on Monday, November 7th from 12:30-2:00 in Dekalb 206. This is a brown bag affair, so bring your lunch. We will provide coffee. Below you will find a description of the seminar. I hope to see you there.

Human
variety plays a pivotal role in history: how we interpret human
diversity dictates what kind of society we construct. Over the last
three hundred years, science has played an increasingly influential role
in explaining and interpreting human variety. How has the rise of
science influenced our conception of human variety? Does science shed
light on the nature of our differences or simply legitimize prevailing
cultural conceptions of difference? Through this talk, we will address
these questions by considering the historical trajectory of how science
conceptualizes human variety. Starting with the battle between the
monogenists and the polygenists of the 18th and 19th centuries, Ric will
describe how the cultural conflict over slavery was reflected in
battles between scientific camps. He will discuss how prevailing culture
influenced the questions scientists asked, the theories they posited,
and the way they used data to validate these theories. Ric will explain
how increasing access to information about the natural world -- paired
with changes in the way science was pursued -- eventually led to the key
insights of Charles Darwin, whose theories in large part displaced
previous conceptions of human variety. Chris will then consider how
post-Darwinian science has conceptualized human variety, beginning with
eugenics and ending with the revolution in genomic technologies. Shifts
in the culture of science and the culture in which science operates, as
well as increased access to genetic data, have all transformed how we
interpret human variety. Nonetheless, echos of past scientific
shortcomings still reverberate through the present-day science of human
genomics. The talk will conclude with the opportunity for the audience
to discuss how present-day science influences our understanding of human
variety.

"The Motion of Stillness: Diaspora, 'Stasis' and Black German Vernacular Photography"

Wednesday November 16th, 12.30-2 pm

ALUMNI READING ROOM

Pratt Library

TINA CAMPT

The Motion of Stillness: Diaspora, ‘Stasis’ and Black German Vernacular Photography

Tina
Campt is Director of Africana Studies and Professor of Africana and
Women’s Studies at Barnard College. Campt’s work theorizes gendered,
racial and diasporic formation in black communities in Germany, and
Europe more broadly. Her monograph, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (2004),
examined the mutual constitution of racial and gendered formation among
German Blacks in the Third Reich. Campt has edited special issues of Feminist Review, Callaloo and small axe, and together with Paul Gilroy, co-edited the volume, Der Black Atlantik (2004). She has published numerous articles, including
her recent essay, “Family Matters: Diaspora, Difference and the Visual
Archive,” which appeared in 2009 in the journal Social Text. Her second book, Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diasporain Europe,
explores early twentieth century family photography of Black Germans
and Black Britons and will be published by Duke University Press in
January 2012.

About Critical & Visual Studies at Pratt

Critical and Visual Studies is a Bachelor of Arts program for the curious and imaginative student who wants to pursue studies in the liberal arts and sciences while immersed in Pratt’s unique environment of creative openness and intellectual experimentation.

We believe that the liberal arts and sciences bring vitality, creativity, and practical application to intellectual practice. Here, every aspect of social life—from street art to political systems, from international media to the global economy—is a potential subject of your studies. The program provides a unique interdisciplinary framework within which our students explore the liberal arts through the study of the artistic, social, and political meanings of cultural and aesthetic production ....(more)